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Friday, August 12, 2011

When it comes to ledes, you really can’t get more simultaneously engaging and farcical than this:

The frequency with which terrorists are found with pornography raises important questions about the possible effects of pornography on our national security.

I read that hoping it was satire. I wish I had been right. Sadly, the rest, written by Jennifer Bryson of conservative think thank The Witherspoon Institute, really doesn’t get any better. In fact, it gets worse, as Bryson proceeds down a convoluted trail of sloppy thinking and correlation/causation fallacies to try and raise Glenn Beck-esque “questions” about some possible link between extremists – Islamic extremists, specifically, as they’re the only ones she ever mentions – and their porn consumption habits.

You know right off the bat that this is gonna be painful. Any essay that treats porn as a possible cause of various cultural or ideological behavior, as opposed to an effect of ingrained cultural and ideological factors, is going to be tough to slog through. You can also dash any hopes of a mention, any at all, of the quandary that inevitably arises when it comes to extremists who don’t have a heightened interest in porn. Because they must just be outliers, obviously.

Begins Bryson [all links removed for brevity]:

This week a federal grand jury indicted Army soldier Naser Jason Abdo, age 21, on three charges related to a plot to attack soldiers near Fort Hood, Texas. When authorities arrested him, they found in his possession bomb-making materials, a gun, ammunition, and the article ”Make a Bomb in the Kitchen of Your Mom,” from a recent issue of al-Qaeda’s English online journal Inspire. Initial questioning of Abdo indicates that his intended targets were U.S. military personnel.

Okay, “Make a Bomb in the Kitchen of Your Mom” really didn’t help me in distinguishing this piece from satire. I don’t receive copies of Inspire, though, so I’ll have to take Bryson’s word for it.

Anyway. Bryson takes a while in explaining that further understanding of the causes behind terrorist wannabe Abdo’s actions is required, and then latches onto this convenient little tidbit:

Yet tucked away, often near the closing paragraph of the articles about this case, is mention of an issue that I believe warrants more attention than it has received in the past decade of terrorism studies: namely, pornography. And in Abdo’s case, child pornography.

Oh, yes. Abdo watched porn. Even moreso, he watched child porn. Because that’s bad, m’kay. Bad enough to lead to terrorism. Or something.

Bryson then wants to make it clear that she is not saying that porn causes terrorism … just that it’s probably inextricably linked to it:

Before examining this, I want to be clear. Considering whether pornography use may have been one factor shaping Abdo’s disturbing behavior is not to pin the lone cause of Abdo’s pursuit of terrorist violence on pornography.

Pornography is not a necessary cause of terrorism. The abolition of pornography would not lead to the cessation of terrorism in the world. Terrorism existed well before graphic pornography and its mass spread via the internet.

Likewise, pornography is not a sufficient cause for terrorism. There are pornography users, even addicts, who do not become terrorists. Given how widespread the viewing of pornography is today, if the direct result of each individual’s pornography use were terrorist violence, one could conceivably argue that pornography proliferation would pose a more widespread threat to human existence than nuclear proliferation.

Actually, if the average individual’s porn consumption had any risks of converting them to extremist behavior, politicians wouldn’t be ranting about the purported dangers of a bunch of explodey goat herders in the Middle East for very long, seeing as the entire world would catapult itself into a global state of endless violence within the hour. The fact that this hasn’t happened yet, despite over a decade of online proliferation of porn (and many, many years more of smutty publications in print) seems to blow a hole right through this idiotic theory, doesn’t it?

It never fails to amaze (and amuse) me how ideological opponents of porn seem intent on equating it with whatever societal ill of their choosing, be it terrorism or sexism, or any of their many other favorite talking points. They all fail to comprehend the same basic thing: Pornography is not a cause. It is a result. And not just of societal cues (though this is the most obvious; freer civilizations promote freedom of speech and belief, and the notion that porn is acceptable certainly falls beneath those headings). Porn is really nothing more than the expression of people’s sexual desires and fantasies. Hell, that’s pretty much its dictionary definition. Someone has a particular kink or fetish, and they make a movie/story/cartoon out of it for others to similarly enjoy. All this does is it promotes the easier transmission of ideas, even if that includes naughty ones.

Another fallacious argument is criticizing pornography in general for the existence of child porn (and etc.). The fact that various more extreme subsets exist isn’t any indictment against the subject itself, despite what moralists and cranks like to pretend. There exists extreme fringes for everything. If we start blaming various subject matter for whatever less tasteful tangents that spawn from it, we’ll have absolutely nothing left at all that won’t be considered immoral in some way. (Then again, these sorts of puritanical zealots don’t seem to be very far from that mark as it is.)

Yet pornography now appears frequently in the possession of violent terrorists and their supporters, including Osama bin Laden. Regarding “smut” found on captured media, in 2010, a Department of Defense al-Qaeda analyst was quoted in The Atlantic: “We have terabytes of this stuff.” Terabytes. That’s a lot of “smut.”

I wonder whether the pornography of today—now ubiquitous and increasingly grotesque—is one of the influences warping the mentality of those who aspire to or who actually go on to engage in ever more grotesque public violence.

Would those terabytes of pornography and such more aptly be dubbed “terrorbytes”? Why, after all, would an al-Qaeda affiliate, as reported in 2009 from interrogations in Mauritania, select pornography to target new recruits? We need to know.

Firstly, “terrorbytes” makes me want to slap you. Secondly, it is as incredibly stupid to blame al-Qaeda’s terrorist activity on its (admittedly impressive) collection of erotica as it is mind-numbingly obvious that a bunch of men who aren’t allowed any sexual contact whatsoever for years and years would instead turn to other means to achieve self-relief. I seriously have no idea why people think that jihadists’ consumption of porn is the slightest bit newsworthy, except perhaps for comedians. It’s apparently considered surprising now that lonely men watch porn, even in the Middle-East. Who knew?

Next up is the most twisted metaphor I’ve heard in a long time:

Consider an ideology like a seed and the disposition of the mind like soil. The particular nature of the seed determines what may become of it. Yet at the same time, the elements of the soil are part and parcel of shaping the manner in which the particular seed grows. A seed in toxic soil can grow into a terrible distortion of the plant it is meant to become. What happens when a radical ideology adheres in a pornography-saturated mind?

Except that, once again, Bryson’s got her cause and effect all mixed up (along with once more abusing the post hoc fallacy). In this figure of speech, the porn would be just another seed germinating from this “toxic soil” as opposed to being a part of it; another consequence in a field of effects caused by the supposed perversion of the ground that births it. And even then, this implies that porn is inherently a bad thing, or that it only sprouts from toxic environments, both of which are facially absurd and easily disproven.

Naturally, with all these terrorizers running amok and spending their days indulging in smut, the next obvious question (in the typical right-wing mind) is: Why isn’t the government watching this?

The second change is that since 9/11, the U.S. government has had opportunity to observe, and in many cases, acquire, personal media from untold numbers of those involved in terrorism and the support of terrorism. We may be sitting on a massive data set for studying the intersection of pornography use and support for twisted violence such as terrorism.

[…]

We may need to invest in understanding the impact of pornography on those who use it, particularly on those who also become obsessed with extremist ideologies. So, I wonder, is anyone in the U.S. government tracking and surveying the presence and types of pornography on these media? If we have access to the libraries of the personal pornography preferences of those who support and engage in terrorist violence, we may have a window into the dark corners of their minds. What lurks there? It may be to our own peril that we would ignore this information before us.

In seeking to understand terrorists, studying their ideas alone is not enough. We need to study and understand their minds—and in this day and age, this includes, in perhaps more cases than we are aware of, minds shaped by pornography.

Not even mentioning the obvious Fourth Amendment issues such a proposal raises, the very idea that government agents should now be expected to sift through confiscated pornography for the sole purpose of identifying what genres (and themes, and fetiches, and positions?) appear most likely to be tied with violent extremism is just unspeakably ludicrous. Not that I think that much of the government as it is, but I’m sure even the laziest or prudish of lawmakers and bureaucrats have other things to do than to watch porn without even enjoying it.

Contrary to his views of 2009 and contrary to the view of other Muslims, including Muslim jurists, Abdo claimed in 2010, “Any Muslim who knows his religion or maybe takes into account what his religion says can find out very clearly why he should not participate in the U.S. military.” Abdo wrote that instead of deploying to Afghanistan, he wanted to use his time to “revive the faith of the Muslim nation.” He also claimed, “I want to use my experience to show Muslims how we can lead our lives.”

Yet his words do not tell the whole story. As evidenced by Abdo’s possession of child pornography, he appears to have had interests other than—and in conflict with—just being a man who “knows his religion” or who takes his religion “into account.”

Uh … no. Whatever may be the case with Abdo, his reported sexual interest in child porn has nothing to do with whatever ideological or personal motives he may have had behind his evil, failed plot. Think what you will about underage porn and those who consume it, but the fact remains that even on a purely logical level, sexual urges and ideology are separate things altogether. No-one has ever committed terrorism for fault of getting laid. Anything that goes beyond mere sexuality therefore enters into ideology itself, and thus cannot possibly be blamed on pornography. (Unless the terrorist were literally committing their acts in the name of porn, or porn opposition. I have yet to hear of any such thing.)

With the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks staring us in the face, we already know that our failure to have an approach to security that is robust and accurate has dire consequences. Pornography has long circulated nearly unbounded due to calls for “freedom,” but what if we are actually making ourselves less free by allowing pornography itself to be more freely accessible?

Are there security costs to the free-flow of pornography? If so, what are they? Are we as a society putting ourselves at risk by turning a blind eye to pornography proliferation?

If we want to stop terrorism, we need to prohibit pornography. Also, free porn is oppression.

You know, I can’t decide whether George Orwell would be proud or spinning in his grave.

As we arrive at the conclusion of her piece, however, Bryson goes all out and attains a veritable climax of stupidity:

I wonder further: Could it be that pornography drives some users to a desperate search for some sort of radical “purification” from the pornographic decay in their soul? Could it be that the greater the wedge pornography use drives between an individual’s religious aspirations and the individual’s actions, the more the desperation escalates, culminating in increasingly horrific public violence, even terrorism?

As Bynum and Fair pointedly questioned, “Can being more realistic about who our foes actually are help us stop the truly dangerous ones?”

After reading that, I’m afraid that “realistic” is the very last word that comes to mind. “Hysterical”, “delusional” and “armchair psychology school drop-out” are rather more evident.

And then, with an ending to make Glenn Beck proud:

Here I offer only questions. I do not know their answers or what rigorous studies of these and related issues will yield. I merely think the time has come to suggest that our continued failure to ask these questions and to pursue their answers may be a mistake we make at our own national peril.

Are representations of consenting adults having sex actually a leading cause behind flying planes into buildings? Questions, questions …

In case you were wondering: No. It’s not even tangentially related, actually. The only thing dangerous about it is the amount of brain-meltage that results when sane people encounter ideological cranks who spew this sort of bullshit.

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About Me

I’m a liberal skeptic, rationalist & third-wave atheist stuck in a rut in Québec, Canada and who spends his time composing, writing, drawing, harboring a layman’s passion for science and technology, getting angry at social injustices, and most of all, jabbing cretins and trolls with sharp pointy sticks. (Oh, and blogging.) Proud owner of a Nize Hat!, an indomitable SIWOTI syndrome and an itchy snark finger.

You can find all my musical, literary and artistic works at my art blog, Creativitas.